EKLIPS

Frank151: We’re here in Seventh Letter’s Known Gallery in LA. How long have you guys had this space?
EKLIPS: It’s been just a little over a month now. This is our second show. The first show was HAZE and Stüssy. This is a group show called “Freedom,” and it’s to help raise money for REVOK’s legal case that he’s fighting right now.
F151: He went to court recently.
E: Yes he did, and everything’s looking a little bit better. I think finally people are starting to recognize that yes, it’s illegal, but yes, it’s beautiful.

Five-nine-four is a penal code. It’s “the act of malicious vandalism.” That’s the only penal code they have for graffiti, and I don’t think what REVOK does is “an act of malicious vandalism.”

F151: AWR MSK has become a very big thing.
E: Yeah.
F151: Take us back in time.
E: Well, at the end of ’88, myself and a couple guys from Culver City High School wanted to have a crew. There were, I think, seven of us originally. We all did graffiti and whatever else kids our age did. We would just paint a lot—as much as we could. The thing that was different about AWR than most crews was that we really just pushed the crew. For a long time people didn’t even realize that AWR was a crew, ’cause it was always just “AWR.” It wasn’t like, “EKLIPS AWR,” “LIAR AWR,” “PATH AWR,” or whatever. So we would go out and we’d crush those three letters on green bus benches, and walls, and freeways, and the yards. We would paint three…four yards in a day. We were really trying to get our name out there, get recognized, and have fun doing it.
F151: When did MSK come in?
E: Eight to ten months later we were getting a name for ourselves. We had gained some members, and we started doing more pieces. We were already doing legal walls, which wasn’t very common back then. I was hanging out with a lot of the KSNs (Kings Stop at Nothing), and they were into punk rock. There was this band called Mad Society, it was these young punk-rock kids. The KSNs were like, “Yo, you’re like Mad Society. You’re these crazy, wild young kids who are down for whatever.” And we were like, “Yeah, Mad Society. Mad Society Kings.”

People we’d meet in yards and stuff wanted to get down with AWR and I don’t think we really felt comfortable with that, ’cause we were such a family. That’s when we started MSK. MSK was like a stepping-stone into AWR.

After a little while, MSK got a mind of its own and started growing. MSK became this really dope crew, and AWR remained what it has always been—a mature crew.


F151: You guys started here in LA.
E: We started out in West LA—Palms, to be exact. I think we first expanded out to the Valley and Thousand Oaks, and then towards Orange County and San Francisco. Then it just grew, and a couple years later we had people all over the world: across the United States, in Germany, France, the UK, Australia, Japan, Taiwan. A lot of that came from traveling. Either we were traveling, or people would come to LA and they’d look us up. We were always at the yards. We were friendly and stuff. We’d meet people, go to lunch, chill, paint with them, they’d come visit all the time, and if they were cool and good people, they would get down with our crew. That’s how we grew.

F151: What about making the transition from illegal graffiti to the gallery?
E: You know what, that really happened at a young age. The first commercial job I did was a music video for Bernadette Cooper. A cool project I did—maybe in ’92—was this commercial with David Lynch for Giorgio Armani. Our boy RISK owned a company called Third Rail and that was established, I think in ’89, and we would do logos for him, and we started learning the computer. That got us into going to trade shows and that stuff. We kept the same mentality and brought it into clothing, into the gallery, and whatever else we were doing.

After years of working with different people who weren’t graffiti writers and realizing that they’re all just bloodsuckers, we started the Seventh Letter. I was over clothing at that point and I was over all of the bullshit. It was around 2001 that we started coming up with the concept. At that time it had went from, “Any tag on a fucking t-shirt is cool,” to, “No, it’s not just any tag on a t-shirt that’s cool.” Even people who didn’t write would be like, “That’s a HAZE shirt...Mr. Cartoon did that...Futura did that.” When people started caring is when I got interested again. That’s when we started the Seventh Letter as a clothing company, and then Seventh Letter was an umbrella to it all. Seventh Letter, in a sense was, “This is our clothing company. It’s not called AWR, it’s not called MSK, but it’s our project. We can let other people do stuff with us, and if we get to know them and they’re cool with us, then they can be allowed into our family.” Same thing as Known Gallery. Known isn’t just AWR or just MSK or just Seventh Letter; it’s a platform for us to meet other people, work with other people, and create this new group of energy and make things happen.


F151: I have to ask, what’s next?
E: It’s such a hard question. I used to answer these questions like, “We’re gonna have a gallery, and we’re gonna have a furniture company, and we’re gonna make jewelry, and we’re going to do this, and we’re gonna do that.” Now it’s like, “What’s next? We’re already doing it.” This is what’s next. Whatever comes naturally. I don’t know what’s next. A lot of people have this misconception that, “EKLIPS does this and EKLIPS does that and he’s the leader of this crew or he’s the founder of this and he’s the one who we all listen to,” or whatever. That’s not at all true. I’m just the outer shell, and my crew members are the mechanisms. Taking that into consideration, there’s 30…40…50 of us active, so it’d be hard for me to say what’s next, ’cause it all depends on those people.
F151: It’s like a Ouija board.
E: Yeah! If REVOK—or whoever it may be—wants to get into whatever it may be, I’m going to try to help make that happen. We have a lot of different things coming up in the future and it all really depends on what falls in our lap.

I never would have guessed, in my wildest dreams, that we would be where we are today. From past experience I can say that the future will be just that much more bizarre. Every day’s a new journey. Especially these days, because the economy is so crazy, the trends are so crazy. We’re just really good at catching the ball and learning how to juggle it quickly.
F151: It helps to have good teammates, too.
E: Yeah, we got a good team. It’s like we’ve got a right wing, we’ve got a left wing, we’ve got some forwards, we got a goalie…we have everything. That’s what makes us successful and that’s what makes it all flow. No matter what life throws at us, we can handle it, together.